in reply to Re^2: Memory addressing
in thread Memory addressing

No chance unless you wish to write a kernel mode driver that does that sort of stuff and talk to that from Perl. Once you've written the driver the talking to it is easy.

DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^4: Memory addressing
by Anonymous Monk on Nov 25, 2005 at 10:05 UTC
    Writing a driver is the final destination with this. We've got a machine that will only run under win311 and its a real pain. I hoped to test out the viability of doing this with familiar tools ie perl.
[reply]

      Bottom line: you can't write drivers in Perl. For various reasons drivers must be written in C (not C++; C) for Windows. Even if you know nothing at all about C, it would be quicker to learn C to write your driver than to attempt to use Perl!

      For early versions of Windows you could use assembly language :), but still not Perl.

      DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel
[reply]
      Unless you have some proprietary legacy peripheral hardware that you have to interface to, it would be cheaper and faster to buy a newish machine and run a recent OS on it, than for you to poke around trying to write a driver. (When things start to go horribly wrong like this for me, I make sure I log every hour spent developing the solution, so at the end I can say "I told you so.")

      But then, you knew that, right? So this must be something that can't run on anything else without even more work than you're already talking about.

      -QM
      --
      Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of

[reply]
        We have legacy hardware that would cost $50k to $100k to replace. The hardware itself is excellent and includes modifications of our own and so would be very hard to replace anyway. However the interface is designed for win3.11, we have split it and run some of the interface functionality on win2k server but we are left lugging 500Mb - 2Gb files accross the network every few minutes which is a pain. The ideal would be to run the whole thing from win2k but we can still improve things physically - alter our network setup, etc. Writing a device driver may be the way to go since I would also see it as beneficial as a learning excercise. I'm looking on Amazon for "writing windows device drivers for dummies" but I fancied a bit of a poke at it with perl cos thats where I'm most at home. Sounds like the prognosis is write a device driver in C or do something else instead. Thanks again monks
[reply]

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom